Hogarth's "Scene in a Gaming House" seems to be a typical image of the
ubiquitous gambling that characterized eighteenth-century British social
life. It depicts a raucous assemblage of men gathered around gaming tables;
some wigs are askew, some swords are drawn, chairs are overturned. One
player pulls his hat over his face in despair at a recent loss while others,
looking treacherous, count their money, perhaps unfairly won. As in so
many of his satirical paintings and prints, Hogarth captures the sordidness
of supposedly genteel men's pastimes. In contrast, a commissioned portrait
by Hogarth, "Assembly at Wanstead House," shows a family group seated decorously
at a game of cards in their formal parlor. Thought to commemorate a twenty-fifth
wedding anniversary, the painting portrays an elegant woman surreptitiously
revealing the winning card, the ace of spades, to a male on-looker. The
representational range of these two images suggests that gambling in the
period did not have a single, simple meaning. Although there were many
voices denouncing play, gambling was not disreputable. In "Assembly at
Wanstead House" and similar portraits, Britons chose to have themselves
depicted gambling, encountering chance, risking money courteously at specially-made
card tables in their homes - as if gambling represented, as much as a portrait
of an aristocrat and his horse, a fundamental aspect of identity.

Eighteenth-century Britons negotiated their relations with their world
through gambling, and the period's novels explore central questions of
British identity through representations of gambling. Not simply an aristocratic
or rakish diversion, gambling, from high-stakes Faro to lottery insurance
to petty wagers, permeated the daily lives of Britons of all classes and
economic strata. Gambling took place alongside the development of a modern
capitalist economy - games were played and stocks were traded in the same
coffee houses - in a culture of flux where it was difficult to tell the
difference between a gamble and an investment, and where the ever-present
threat of cheaters undermined society's fictions of stability. Building
on Ian Hacking and Lorraine Daston's studies of chance and the origins
of probability theory, this cultural history of gambling reveals the centrality
of the arts of play for the construction of civic, social, and private
selves in a period that was anything but the "Age of Reason."

In an introductory survey of the customs, protocols, and arts of play,
I examine the relationship between gambling and early financial practices
such as stocks, annuities, and insurance, detail the laws governing play,
and analyze the physical objects used for gaming. My dissertation then
traces in the ensuing chapters economies - of realism and probability,
sentiment, gender, and empire - inflected by gambling. The first chapter
examines the gap between the theory and the practice of risk that continued
throughout the eighteenth century despite the development of mathematical
probability theory. I argue that the laws of probability seemed irrelevant
to gamesters because the rampant cheating that made calculation impractical
and the inconsistent application of the anti-gaming laws conditioned gamesters
to perceive play as an unquantifiable series of individual episodes. Edmond
Hoyle's "Short Treatise on Whist" was the first successful application
of the theory of risk to gaming. Drawing on older games manuals, he presented
probability not as a collection of overarching laws that minimized anomalies
into a discernible pattern but as picaresque narrative, a series of discrete
cases or incidents. Tobias Smollett's picaresque novel, Ferdinand Count
Fathom, bears out the gamester's suspicion of totalizing probability
theory by representing an episodic world of unquantifiable cheating that
can be resolved novelistically only by a sudden turn to providential narrative
that is both unrealistic - improbable - and unconvincing. In Henry Fielding's
final novel, Amelia, cheating at play symbolizes a world that is
not ordered by divine design; the narrator, who is much less confident
than that of Tom Jones, can bring about a happy ending only by improbable
recourse to special providence. The divinely designed, ordered world that
both mathematical probability theory and providential narrative posit cannot
account for the cheater's paradise that Smollett and Fielding wished to
represent realistically in their novels of London life.

While gambling culture upset tidy economies of mathematical and providential
order, economies of gender were created and critiqued at gaming tables.
My second chapter examines the fictional ideal of the disinterested male
gambler as a response to a world where a wager seems to be the only remaining
honorable financial transaction untainted by the increasing desire for
gain that renders class distinctions meaningless. Sentimental gamblers
in Oliver Goldsmith's journalism, Sarah Fielding's David Simple,
and Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling, who, in David Simple's
words, define goodness of character by "contempt for money," indicate dissatisfaction
with the contemporary world in which male character is defined precisely
by money, rather than by spectacles of feeling. The sentimental gambler,
working against the increasing symbiosis of emotional and monetary economies,
performs his disdain for the marketplace paradoxically by refusing to spend
emotion at the gaming table. The sentimental gambler's desire to separate
money and feeling, however, is both futile and dangerous; William Godwin's
St.
Leon exposes the emotional isolation that the sentimental, aristocratic
male ethos, including disinterested gambling, courts.

The sentimental male gambler wants to keep emotional and monetary spending
distinct, but the female gambler threatens to conflate a monetary economy
with a sexual one. My third chapter reads the portrait of a female gambler
in Frances Burney's Camilla in the context of a century's worth
of plays, essays, poems, and another Hogarth painting, "The Lady's Last
Stake." These representations develop the anxiety that the gaming woman
took herself out of sexual circulation when she sat down to cards, thus
neglecting lover, husband, or children, at the same time that her inevitable
gambling losses would lead her to repay her debts with sexual favors. While
the ideal male gambler was supposed to remain emotionally aloof from the
game, the female gambler's passions were imagined as utterly absorbing,
eclipsing the affections that bound her to her duties, her sexual honor,
and her social functions. Burney's female gamester forms part of her novel's
broader exploration of an economy in which a woman's monetary expenditure,
whether at the gaming table or the milliner's shop, is seen as a sexual
act that must be monitored and regulated by men.

Moving beyond Great Britain's shores to the Atlantic economies that
sustained the nation, my fourth chapter examines the nexus of gambling,
education, and empire in Maria Edgeworth's
Belinda. I contrast a
wager between an English child and a Jamaican creole slave-owner on an
English country estate with that creole's own childhood gambling "with
his negroes" on his plantation. Worried about a too-permeable boundary
between "At Home" and "Abroad," Edgeworth links gambling with slave-owning,
and, in an effort to strengthen that boundary, unfairly blames the creole
for both, even though many of the novel's English characters gamble and
all of them participate in the slave economy. Contextualizing the novel
by analyzing educational playing cards from the period, as well as the
role gambling plays in Edgeworth's pedagogical theory, I argue that Belinda,
despite its repudiation of gambling, imagines that a carefully supervised
exposure to chance could produce properly educated colonial subjects, a
fantasy that allays Edgeworth's fear that British society at the turn of
the nineteenth century was not rationally ordered but was itself a game
of chance. Edgeworth wants gambling to represent the disorder of the empire
beyond Great Britain's borders, but, as in Smollett and Fielding's novels,
gambling undermines fictions of British stability.

My dissertation returns to economies of gender in the final chapter
on Jane Austen's
Persuasion, examining Anne Eliot's use of a system
of secondary calculation familiar to women throughout the eighteenth century
who describe marriage as a lottery and a woman's happiness as a matter
of chance. Persuasion draws on conventional representations of gamblers
to open the novel to the more psychological, less topical, explorations
of gambling that become common in nineteenth-century fiction. Inflected
by Bath's illustrious history as a gambling resort, Persuasion examines
the conditions of risk-taking and decision-making. Contrasting Wentworth's
confidence in his luck with the confidence game of William Elliot, who
springs from the tradition of rakish, villainous gamblers in eighteenth-century
drama and fiction, Anne Elliot, who once feared risk, develops a sophisticated
appreciation for the boons of chance and is better able to assess true
risks. Austen's novel thus serves as a fitting conclusion to this study,
for it both relies on the culture of gambling so amply documented in earlier
representations of the arts of play and points toward the more symbolic
thematics of gambling found in the novels of George Eliot, Benjamin Disraeli,
and Anthony Trollope.